The Plowboy Interview

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"If we learn more than the doctor in areas of value to our health, it is our duty to apply this knowledge to the betterment of ourselves and our families. We need total health more than medically approved health."

So says 28-year-old Andrew Saul in the opening chapter of his manual Doctor Yourself. Saul is, it seems, engaged in a struggle to expand the frontiers of the medical self-care movement . . . taking the radical view—even in the eyes of some longtime self-help advocates—that a person who lives a truly healthful life should almost never need the services of medical professionals. In the process of spreading his message, Dr. Saul (he's not an AL D., but rather a doctor of naturopathy, a title recognized in several states and widely accepted in Europe) managed to become the first person certified by New York State to teach naturopathic healing and health-maintaining techniques . . . established the Ashwins Health Institute in Hamlin, New York . . . set up a charity vitamin dispensary for the poor in nearby Rochester. . . and published a shopper's guide to healthful supermarket foods, a how-to manual aimed at helping people through their first body-cleansing fast, arid the book Doctor Yourself. Along with all that, he has still found time to teach classes at the State University of New York at Brockport, bombard local newspapers with alternative medical information and generally make every effort to bring his message of natural health care to as many people as he possibly can.

In fact, Andrew Saul first came to MOM's attention while he was teaching a series of courses at last summer's Community of Homesteaders' Good Life Get-Together in Naples, New York. Once the MOTHER staffer who visited the festival saw that Dr. Saul's presentations were progressively better attended as the days went on, he sat in on one himself . . . and quickly became convinced that the outspoken naturopath's ideas merited sharing with our readers.

So MOTHER sent Bruce Woods to visit Dr. Saul at the Ashwins Health Institute for an in-depth discussion. Mind you, by presenting their conversation (in edited form), we are not necessarily endorsing Dr. Sauls ideas, and—more important—we're certainly not trying to convince anyone to avoid traditional medical care. However, we did indeed find Sauls words to be a stimulating challenge to our own ideas of self-health responsibility. And by sharing his thoughts and providing access information on pertinent books and medical studies, we hope to help you, our readers, to be better able to make wise decisions on questions pertaining to your own health and that of your families. After all, there are not many other situations in which finding the right answer can be so vital.

PLOWBOY: Dr. Saul, you've made a name for yourself in the field of alternative medicine at a fairly tender age. That leads me to believe that your interest in medical alternatives goes back a goodly number of years.

SAUL: Well, in essence, I was drawn into natural healing because I found that regular healing didn't work. And I suppose the seeds of that realization were sown when I was a child. Like everybody else, I had the usual injections, and then I went overseas and had more shots, and I ate meals based on the so-called four basic food groups (again like everybody else), and I got sick like everybody else. Not all the time, of course, but often enough.

Now, my "conversion", if you can call it that, was a very slow process . . . I more or less backed into the alternative health field. You see, I was still intending to go into traditional medicine when naturopathic healing was introduced to me by Professor John Mosher at SUNY at Brockport, where I was enrolled in a premed program. Dr. Mosher challenged me on one simple point. He said, "If you really want to help people, why don't you at least investigate the natural healing techniques as well as those of conventional medicine. Let the merits of each system tell you which is best." So I began looking into the subject, and the book that turned me around was Aubrey Westlake's The Pattern of Health. It's a rather unspectacular-looking paperback, but it's probably the most important volume I've read in the last 12 years. Westlake was an experienced English M.D. who had also backed into natural healing, so I could easily relate to what he had experienced. Briefly, he felt that, after 40 years as a physician, he'd spent too much of his time just bailing out leaking boats. He was frustrated by his inability to get down to causes . . . to promote self-help and to effect practical, deep-down cures. The Patternof Health is the story of his discovery of alternative healing techniques. That book inspired me to read more on the subject, and one thing led to another. I soon started using basic naturopathic methods myself—such as fasting, switching to a vegetarian diet, and taking vitamin supplements—and I actually started feeling better.

PLOWBOY: Were there any other experiences that contributed to your disillusionment with standard medicine?

SAUL: Well, when I observed my first surgeries, I found that I wasn't particularly enamored with the idea of cutting out someone's adrenal glands, or otherwise "invading" the person's body, in the hopes of achieving a desired end, one that often wouldn't come about. But the conflict between my medical career and my "sideline" research into alternatives really became intense while I was studying in Boston.

PLOWBOY: Was that at Brigham Hospital?

SAUL: The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, yes. Now don't get me wrong: That institution's staff members are very good at crisis medicine. But as far as knowing what kind of diet will help a person back to health . . . well, let's just say that I was amazed to see people who had diverticulitis or who'd just had a colostomy getting white bread, soda pop, overcooked vegetables, tiny little salads, slabs of overcooked meat, and no vitamin supplements at all. These were individuals who had been through grueling surgery—sometimes people who were dying—and this lack of nutritional care nailed home the point that orthodox medicine is sometimes wrong. Those who practice it often don't know what they are doing.

However, I also had to begin to ask myself whether I really knew what I hoped to be doing. And that concern led me to a great source of information. I started reading reprints produced by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research and found it to be an excellent outlet for good, hard medical and nutritional information. Better still, these reprinted articles are right out of the mainline medical journals . . . including Clinical Physiology,the Journal of Applied Nutrition, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the rest. The foundation has simply reprinted features that describe instances in which drugs do not work, and others that demonstrate how vitamins and foods can cure real diseases.

And that was what I needed to see . . . reports by doctors who'd worked with medical alternatives. At that point there was no turning back for me, because I was faced with overwhelming evidence . . . data provided by medical doctors, by researchers, by Ph.D.'s, and by leaders in their fields. I'd discovered a tremendous amount of material and I'd begun to see that nature cure was not just a questionable method of treating the common cold, but that it could also be used for cancer, encephalitis, meningitis, pneumonia, polio, diverticulitis, and other terrifying diseases.

PLOWBOY: Yet although you received your doctorate in naturopathy in 1976, you weren't able to actually use it until 1980.

SAUL: Yes, I was able to open the Ashwins Health Institute only after an uphill battle. Professor Mosher, an accountant named Keith Taylor, and I began the process by filing for nonprofit corporate status. To do so, we had to obtain the approval of the state attorney general. And, as you probably know, natural healing is not yet considered legitimate medicine in New York State (but it is accepted in some others . . . including Oregon, Washington, and California).

At any rate, the attorney general approved us without question, and our next step was to approach the New York State Education Department, which actually licenses physicians in New York. We assured that organization that we weren't going to practice medicine or grant M.D. diplomas. So the Education Department approved us in short order, at which point we had to get an OK from the county supreme court. Once that was obtained, the state granted us, after some months, our nonprofit status. Then we asked the Internal Revenue Service to verify and underline what the state had done, and to grant us a tax exemption so that our donors' contributions would not have to be split with the government and could be applied, in total, to the services that we hoped w provide . . . tile charitable vitamin dispensary that we now run, for instance.

This application turned into yet another round of forms and letters. Eventually, however, the IRS granted us tax-exempt status. I do believe that the whole process was worthwhile, though, because when a client or student comes to see me, he or she wants to be assured of dealing with a recognized and reputable professional. I'm always careful to point out that I'm certified by the state of New York to teach what I'm teaching.

"A person really can choose to get well or to stay sick . . . and it's shocking to me that many people choose illness."

PLOWBOY: This would probably be a good time to give a working definition of naturopathy.

SAUL: Well, first of all, naturopathy could also be called nature cure, natural healing, or even natural therapeutics. Nature cure is very different from standard—or allopathic—medicine, because a naturopath does not use drugs and doesn't perform surgery.

Now the first question one might ask upon hearing that is "Well, then, what on earth do you do?"

To answer that, I have to admit that there are a number of naturopathic approaches. Natural healing is a highly diverse field. However, rather than limit myself to any one of these schools of thought, I believe in using sort of a team approach . . . that is, employing many such methods in concert. I'm interested in results rather than "pet" theories. All I want to see is people getting better, and any technique that they can use to get results is fine with me.

Furthermore, nature cure almost always is safer than allopathic medicine. After all, a healthful diet is probably the keystone to ally form of naturopathic therapy. And there are no unpleasant side effects of eating right.

PLOWBOY: It would seem that you're saying the patient bears the responsibility for his or her own health, then.

SAUL: Exactly. A person really can choose to get well or to stay sick . . . and it's shocking to me that many people choose illness. I often tell folks that everybody has the right to be sick. And I'm not being flippant when I say that! If a person really wants to get well, he or she won't mind making a change of lifestyle . . . or taking whatever course of action will help him or her get better.

If an individual wants to get well enough, or perhaps I should say if a person wants to get well, enough. . . he or she will be willing to take such steps. In fact, my most successful students often tend to be just a bit desperate and discouraged . . . and that combination can sometimes yield remarkable results. Many people do their best work when their backs are against the wall.

PLOWBOY: Why is it that nature cure has such a limited acceptance in this country? Isn't it far more generally recognized overseas?

SAUL: Naturopathy is downright mainstream in many other countries. In Germany, for example, naturopathic healers are abundant. Furthermore, there was a time when nature cure practitioners were far more common in the U.S. In Florida, for instance, two sister bills were passed in 1927: the Naturopathic Practice Act and the Medical Practice Act. In those days, naturopaths and medical doctors often worked side by side. But by 1959, the nature cure practitioners were no longer being licensed, while, of course, the M.D.'s are to this day.

The official reason for such "precautionary" restrictions is to protect people from quack therapies. And many individuals have been taken in by treatments that are statistically invalid. Unfortunately, orthodox medicine leads the league in the use of statistically invalid approaches to human illness. One has only to read Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis to verify that medicine not only is without statistical significance in many cases, but also is sometimes definitely harmful. One out of five people admitted to a typical research hospital today will acquire an iatrogenic—or doctor caused—disease!

PLOWBOY: Can you cite some well-documented clinical evidence of the effectiveness of nature cure?

SAUL: Yes, a great deal of it. You have only to go to the journal of Applied Nutrition, to the Journal of the Franklin Institute, to ClinicalPhysiology, to The Lancet, or to any of the many excellent British and German journals to find that such techniques are well established. For instance, in 1950 Dr. Benjamin P. Sandler, a United States Navy physician, then at the Mayo Clinic, treated tuberculosis—and did so more effectively than anyone else at that clinic at the time-using nothing but a high-protein, low—carbohydrate diet.

Then too, Dr. William J. McCormick of Toronto, Canada has—since 1946, at least—been using high doses of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to treat herniated or ruptured disks, as well as a variety of infectious childhood illnesses. Or how about Dr. Frederick Robert Klenner of Reidsville, North Carolina? For 45 years he's been using vitamin C as an antibiotic, an antitoxin, and an antihistamine. He's employed it, with success, against polio, meningitis, tetanus, encephalitis, and a number of other serious diseases. This man is giving injections of vitamin C, and reported—in A Physician's Handbook on Orthomolecular Medicine —that vitamin C is the most useful therapeutic substance available to the doctor.

Klenner suggests that when an M.D. admits a patient to the hospital, the first thing he or she should do is to administer vitamin C while deciding what other course of action to take. In many cases, the physician won't have to do anything else . . . because the vitamin therapy will cure the condition. Why, high doses of vitamin C can even be a beautiful treatment for infected cows. I worked on a dairy farm for a while before I started practicing, and helped inject doses of a million or more units of antibiotics to cows with mastitis. Yet if farmers would give their milking stock 20,000 to 30,000 milligrams of vitamin C and eight ounces of cider vinegar a day, the animals wouldn't have mastitis problems.

Colds, cancer, bronchitis, pneumonia, herpes, meningitis, encephalitis . . . how, people ask, can one vitamin cure so many different illnesses? The answer is that the lack of one vitamin can cause many different illnesses.

PLOWBOY: Hold on there. Are you saying that you know of people who've achieved a complete and total remission of genital herpes as a result of vitamin therapy?

SAUL: Yes, that's the proper term for it . . . complete and total remission. The specific form of vitamin C used was calcium ascorbate, in conjunction with sizable doses of L-lysine, a magnesium supplement, and a vegetarian diet. The amount of calcium ascorbate may exceed 40,000 milligrams daily. And yet, proportionate to body weight, that's no more vitamin C than a sick rat would manufacture!

PLOWBOY: Right. Rats, goats, and many other animals produce vitamin C in their bodies, and the amount varies with the creature's health.

SAUL: Yes, a healthy rat may manufacture the equivalent of a human dose of 6 grams a day. A sick rat—or goat—will manufacture a good deal more.

Vitamin C is inexpensive . . . has broad-spectrum utility . . . is effective . . . and is safe. Yet it gets absolutely no significant attention from the medical community. Perhaps that's because physicians don't believe that anything cheap, safe, and generic could work.

PLOWBOY: And, of course, it's also available without a prescription.

SAUL: That's precisely why vitamin C appeals to me, because I'm trying to promote radical wellness self-reliance. By that I don't mean that people should just learn when to go to the doctor or how to avoid mixing their medicines. Such concepts are little more than grade school—level medical self-reliance. I want people not only to know what type of—approach might help them, but also to be able to take the appropriate action and get results, totally on their own. People no longer have to suffer.

PLOWBOY: And it was to spread the word about such health care that you came out with your self-published book, Doctor Yourself. . . which I believe you've called a "health homesteader's handbook".

SAUL: The purpose of Doctor Yourself is to describe—in simple, practical, immediately useful terms—12 ways people can improve their own health.

PLOWBOY: But how do you convince them that they have the capability of managing their own health?

SAUL: The book addresses that fear right off. The first chapter explains that it's easy—and safe—to be your own doctor . . . if you know how. The absence of knowledge is what should be feared.

PLOWBOY: Well, how can a person obtain the necessary knowledge? What sorts of materials are available to the public?

SAUL: Doctor Yourself lists about 140 readily available books and articles, and that's by no means intended to be a complete bibliography. However, the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research should be the first source a person investigates. [EDITOR'S NOTE: See tire access list accompanying this interview.] I'd even go so far as to suggest that anyone interested in self-care get one copy of every reprint and book the foundation publishes. These would prove to the person, as much as anything can be proved by written material, that "real" doctors do cure diseases with nutrition . . . with fasting . . . with vitamins . . . and with minerals.

Then again, people can simply go to their local libraries, and even to medical libraries—no one's going to throw them out—and research any disease that they'd like to understand. I'd also suggest visiting a pharmacy, borrowing the establishment's copy of the Physician's Desk Reference for Prescription Drugs, and reading enough of it to appreciate how dangerous many drugs are and how little is known about the majority of them. Yet another valuable source of information is the Merck Manual. It's a 2,400-page medical text, and it sells for about $12. That's almost like getting four years of medical education for $12!

PLOWBOY: It sounds like quite a bargain.

SAUL: Yes. This is a book that practically every physician has on his or her desk, and one that every health homesteader should have, too. Now, you might well ask, do I really believe people are going to go through this volume and learn everything they need to know? Certainly not. In fact, I think much of the information in the Merck Manual concerns ways of approaching illness that I'd disagree with. But the book does at least correctly describe symptoms and conventional treatments. It will let a reader know what the medical approach to a specific problem would be.

I also highly recommend Dr. Schuessler's Biochemistry by J.B. Chapman, M.D. The 168-page book lists the 12 Schuessler cell salts and tells exactly how to use them . . . it's doubly cross-referenced . . . and it's probably the most valuable single medical book for the home I've ever seen. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The 12 Schuessler cell salts were categorized, in 1873 by the German biochemist whose name they bear. Many naturopaths believe they can be used to relieve disease by restoring the minerals missing in the affected tissue.]

The next book that belongs in the health homesteader's library is Boericke's Materia Medica, ninth edition, by William Boericke. This 1,000-page volume, a detailed presentation of homeopathic theory and treatment, will set you back about $20.

The possible additions to this list are, of course, about as numerous as the world's diseases. But it's safe to say that you could make a good "tool kit" with six or seven books . . . six or eight herbs . . . a very big bottle of vitamin C . . . some good multiple vitamins (everyone should, I think, take a high-potency natural multiple vitamin a day) . . . and a few other basics.

PLOWBOY: So the tools and the information needed for medical self-care are probably more accessible than most people believe. But aren't there some legal implications of doing one's own doctoring?

SAUL: First of all, it's completely lawful to doctor yourself. The Constitution provides for that. You may also treat your immediate family if you—and they—wish. Should you start prescribing for a friend or a neighbor, though, you'd be venturing into legal corridors. And, if you charge for treating a neighbor or friend, you are definitely asking for trouble.

Then again, though, I don't treat anybody. And I don't diagnose,0 prescribe, or operate. Instead, I teach people how to diagnose and how to treat themselves to get specific results. They may use that education or not . . . it's up to them.

PLOWBOY: I've read that you're opposed to vaccination.

SAUL: Slow down a second. I do counsel people frequently on the pros and cons of vaccination. But I never tell anyone not to get shots or to get shots. I simply point out the alternatives that are available. Our four-year-old daughter has never had an injection, and our son is no longer getting them, vet both youngsters—lifelong vegetarians—are at least as healthy as the other children in the neighborhood.

PLOWBOY: Even though they're exposed to the many contagious illnesses children encounter in school?

SAUL: Yes. And if you're initially put of by this idea, remember that the unvaccinated child poses absolutely no threat at all to the other children, because the others have had their shots. So the only possible complaint can be one of neglect, with the argument that says, "If you don't allow vaccinations, you're injuring that child." But that just isn't necessarily a true statement. The fact of the matter is that many injections—including the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus shots—are not without risks of their own. What's more, many vaccines may not be all they're cracked up to be. For instance, there was a medical doctor up in Canada who treated polio with iodine supplements in the 1950's. The method is called iodine prophylaxis, and the effectiveness of his treatments suggests that the popularization of iodized salt has had more to do with the elimination of polio in America than the polio vaccine!

Now I am not saying that there's no statistical significance to results with the Salk vaccine. But I also believe that, on a scale of 1 to 10, it definitely ranks below 2. Whereas I think vitamin C, a vegetarian diet, and iodine will actually prevent polio more effectively. Once again, all of the evidence supporting this theory can be found in articles available from the Lee Foundation.

PLOWBOY: Let's say an individual who's reading this interview decides, "Well, this Dr. Saul seems to make some sense, and I know I haven't been taking care of myself as well as I could." 'then . . .

SAUL: What should he or she do?

PLOWBOY: Yes. And—to be more explicit—if someone isn't ready to jump into a major lifestyle change with both feet, what initial steps might give him or her enough immediate results to provide encouragement?

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